The best novels written before 1800

“All women together ought to let flowers fall on the tomb of Aphra Behn... in Westminster Abbey, for it was she who earned them the right to speak their minds.” The first professional woman writer in England, best known for her scandalous stage comedies during the reign of Charles II, Behn ended her career with a hard-hitting novel about slavery and rebellion in colonial Suriname. It may not be true, as she says when dedicating Oroonoko (1688) to a Scottish nobleman, that “I writ it in a few hours.” But there’s real urgency to Behn’s narrative as she deplores the fate of her enslaved hero, an African prince she likens to “a lion taken in a toil,” while also sounding the alarm about regime change back home in England. 

The book that flew from the shelves when COVID struck in 2020. Fresh from his masterpiece Robinson Crusoe (1719) and his thrilling novel of urban survival, Moll Flanders (1722), Daniel Defoe turned next to the bubonic plague that devastated London in 1665. The protagonist and narrator of A Journal of the Plague Year (1722) is personally an enigma: we don’t even know his name, just his initials, H.F. But he reports the trauma all around him in relentless, unflinching detail: the terrifying rumours and padlocked houses; the crazed prophets and mass graves; “Persons falling dead in the Streets, terrible Shrieks and Skreekings of Women, who in their Agonies would throw open their Chamber Windows, and cry out in a dismal Surprising Manner.”

The towering achievement of eighteenth-century fiction, but long, very long—and not because of the plot so much as the form. “There is no Story,” wrote Hester Thrale, an early admirer of Clarissa (1747-8): “A man gets a Girl from her Parents—violates her Free Will, & She dies of a broken heart.” Around this brutal, elemental tale of toxic courtship and finally rape, however, the novel uses competing, divergent points of view to problematize access to the action, its causes and effects, its rights and wrongs, its large implications for sexual politics and social class. With its multiple narrators, Clarissa probes complex psychologies in startling new ways and throws the burden of interpretation and judgment on its readers. It’s not just a compelling story but a vast, endlessly troubling altercation about that story, with each narrator, one way or another, “throwing dust in the eyes of his judges.”

Tobias Smollett, Scotland’s greatest novelist before Scott and Stevenson, was dying in a villa on the Ligurian coast when his masterpiece Humphry Clinker came out in London in 1771. Yet every page is written with astounding verve, immersing readers in the vibrant chaos of eighteenth-century Britain, the sights and sounds of its teeming cities and health resorts—even, in several virtuoso passages of gross-out description, its nauseating smells and tastes. Like Richardson before him, Smollett gives his narrative over to multiple voices, this time to riotously comic effect. Five Anglo-Welsh tourists (splenetic Bramble, scathing Tabitha, witty Jery, romantic Lydia, their hilariously unpredictable servant Win) travel the length and breadth of a nation in the throes of urbanization and commercial modernity, by turns disgusted and enchanted, constantly failing to agree on what they see. Illicit romances play out in the background, but Smollett’s main interest is in the turbulent dynamism of four-nations Britain, its stresses and strains, its conflicts and accommodations, its vast energies and potentialities.     

Jane Austen’s most enduringly popular novel didn’t appear in print until 1813, but the earliest version of it, now lost, was drafted under the title First Impressions in 1796-7, when she was scarcely out of her teens. In one of the most spectacular bloopers of publishing history, the leading bookseller Thomas Cadell rejected the manuscript sight and unseen, and it gathered dust until the modest success of Sense and Sensibility (1811) prompted Austen to try again with a revised (and probably shorter, pacier) version. “The work is rather too light, and bright, and sparkling; it wants shade,” Austen told her sister Cassandra, no doubt (and as ever) with tongue in cheek. Alongside its famously euphoric romance plot concerning Elizabeth and Darcy, Pride and Prejudice also carries a satirical charge, and contains two of the most memorably loathsome characters in all fiction: cruel, snobbish Lady Catherine de Bourg and her smarmy, acquisitive sidekick Mr. Collins.